Flowers for Robby (RCD4)

Saturday, March 9th marked the one year anniversary of our friend Rob’s passing. But it just so happened that on Saturday, March 9th, the sun came out, the weather warmed up and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was the perfect day and date to plant a flower bed in honor of Robby. Nice Guy Ted had been collecting annual and perennial bulbs for us and brought them over that Saturday to plant. I wish we could plant a PBR tree or concrete flowers for him, but tulips andÂ day liliesÂ will have to do.

First we had to decide on placement. It had to be a spot that was going to be easy to water with plenty of sun and in a location that we could see it all the time and enjoy it. Turns out that the south side of the garden shed would be the perfect place. It’s right off the road, close to the house and easily accessible.

The site of the flower bed. Easily accessible, right off the road and plenty of good sun!

So this is how we put Rob’s flower bed together in less than 3 hours.

We have a lot of 4′ wide weed cloth stored in the garden shed for use in the vegetable garden this year. So we cut it to length (about 20 feet) and laid it along the side of the shed.

The weed cloth cut and ready to go!

Next, we gathered some railroad ties that we had laying around the farm. We cut those to size and used them as a border for the flower bed.

Dave cutting the railroad ties with a chainsaw, Nice Guy Ted on the assist.Weed cloth and railroad ties down!

Then we reinforced the railroad ties with some rebar stakes to give it that old timey-rustic look. Just kidding. It’s just what we had laying around.

Rebar reinforcement

After we got all of the railroad ties secure, we had to fill the bed up with dirt. We just so happened to have a massive pile of black goldÂ (a 50/50 blend of garden soil and compost) that we’re adding to our vegetable garden this year. Dave loaded up the bucket on the tractor with some black gold and we started filling in the flower bed.

Making a flower bed goes by a lot faster when you have a tractor and a lot of friends with rakes and shovels.There’s Nice Guy Ted! Hi Nice Guy Ted! Thank you for the flowers!

Then came the fun part… planting all of these beautiful bulbs! We have a beautiful mix ofÂ day liliesÂ tulips, crocus, caladiums, blue iris, hyacinth and daffodils. We decided to go with a more “natural” looking flower bed and didn’t really care about everything being perfectly symmetrical or spaced. I think we have about 100 bulbs in our 4’x20′ bed, I can’t wait to see how it all turns out! But that, my friends, is how you make a flower bed in less than 3 hours.

The last thing we’ll need to do is place a gutter on that side of the garden shed and connect it to a rain barrel attached to a soaker hose so it can water the flower bed evenly andÂ efficiently. But that’s another project for another time. Like, next week hopefully.

Autumn and Nice Guy Ted planting the bulbsAll done! In the next few weeks we should have a badass flower bed for our badass friend Robby.These should be blooming as early as next week. And I completely forgot which bulbs they were. Shoot… I guess we’ll find out.

[…] Anyway, we’ve started to notice some signs that spring has arrived; the hyacinths inÂ Rob’s flower bedÂ have started to bloom, we have a seriously broody buff orpington, the greenhouse is full of […]